Medicine: Ether Centennial

“Yesterday morning, Dr. Morton, Dentist, No. 19 Tremont Row . . . visited the… hospital, and administered his preparation to produce sleep, to a person about to undergo the operation of the extraction of a tumor from the neck. . . . The patient did not manifest the slightest symptoms of suffering. … He appeared to be totally insensible to what was going on.”

On Oct. 17, 1846, the chatty Boston Evening Journal offered its readers this one-paragraph scoop on the first full-dress demonstration of anesthesia. The show had been shrewdly staged by publicity-wise, 27-year-old Dentist William Thomas Green Morton and a Journal reporter named Albert Tenney. Dr. Morton’s “preparation,” fed to the patient through a tube from a corked flask, was ether, disguised with aromatic essences to hide the “secret.” The operation, conducted by Dr. John Collins Warren, frock-coated chief surgeon of Massachusetts General Hospital, made a profound impression on doctors and medical students in the small, gloomy amphitheater. Cried Dr. Warren: “Gentlemen, this is no humbug!”

Last week 4,000 top-rank U.S. scientists and medicos went to Massachusetts General to celebrate the centennial of Morton’s and Warren’s historic operation. After reverent visits to the famed Ether Dome, now a medical shrine, the scientists settled down, in a huge tent pitched outside the hospital, to a three-days’ appraisal of the ether century. The consensus, as summed up by Dr. Henry Knowles Beecher, Massachusetts General’s anesthetist in chief: Anesthesia “was perhaps man’s greatest and most original discovery. . . . If, at a stroke, the world’s poverty were to be wiped out, this would hardly be greater than the fact of clinical anesthesia.”

Morton was not ether’s inventor (it had been known since the 16th Century — in the 1830s, “ether frolics” were a popular substitute for drinking), nor even the first to use it in an operation.* But medical historians agree that Morton started the new era in surgery. Three months after his demonstration, surgeons on both sides of the Atlantic were giving ether; the screams and struggles of patients on the operating table had begun to subside.

Modern science has developed dozens of new pain killers (novocaine, spinal blocks, cyclopropane, sodium pentothal, etc.), but ether is still safest and best. Enthusiastic centennial speakers noted that anesthesia has brought many boons to man besides easier human surgery: e.g., it made possible a vast amount of painless experimentation on animals. Now, said Dr. Beecher, a “second power” of anesthesia is emerging—the power of probing the human mind. “With anesthetic agents we seem to have a tool for producing and holding at will different levels of consciousness—a tool that promises to be of great help in studies of the mind and its workings.”

There was one damper to all the enthusiasm: after a century of study, scientists still have no answer to the elementary question—how does an anesthetic produce its effects?

* Georgia’s Dr. Crawford W. Long claimed to have operated with ether in 1842, but published no report until 1849; Connecticut’s’Dentist Horace Wells used laughing gas (nitrous oxide) in 1844 for tooth-pulling.